BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

196
SPATIAL SCHEMATISM
she actively confronts and interacts with it, and actively recreates the
shape in question. She is, as Kant says in On a Discovery, selbsttätig. 37
Most important, however, is the point already stated, that in making
this movement she makes roughly the same movement as the one she
would have performed in order to construct a triangle. Thus, while she
explores the triangle, it is at the same time as if she constructs its shape.
In the schematism chapter Kant tells us that we need to know how to
construct a triangle in order to know what a triangle is, and in order to
recognize a triangle as a triangle. According to my interpretation, Kant’s
basic idea in the second example of the schematism chapter is that the
recognition of the triangle as a triangle takes place when the agent makes
a movement like the one just described, and, in making this movement
recognizes it as the movement involved in the construction of triangles.
The reason why she recognizes the triangle, then, is not that she
recognizes the shape of a triangle as such, but that she recognizes the
practice of its construction.
This point is also made in a different way by Kitcher who writes:
We apply concepts to presented objects by noting in some
unconscious way that the imagination followed the same procedure in
constructing a present image that it followed in previous cases. That
is, concept application involves a comparison of procedures for
constructing representations, rather than a comparison of images
themselves. 38
Kitcher does not, however, take the procedure involved here to be an
embodied practice. The procedure is performed in the mind, and its
cognitive function follows from the fact that it is followed by ‘the mind’s
eye’, she argues. 39
6.8 The key argument
In what follows I shall insist that the construction of images or image-like
structures discussed in Kant’s theory of schematism has to be conceived
of as embodied practices in the spatio-temporal domain in the way
suggested above. I shall defend this position not only because I think that
a careful reading of the Kantian text allows us to do so. I shall argue that
37
Ak VIII: 191, footnote. This point is also promoted by Saugstad, cf. e.g.
Saugstad (1993), 109.
38
Kitcher (1990), 153.
39
Ibid., 156.